However, despite all the early warning signs, his parents would be “shaken by the news,” as Mariano puts it, when he decided to pursue photography as a career. “My teachers, my classmates, New York in the 1970’s, proved to be an extraordinary experience. I found out that it was ok to feel rather than examine what was in front of me. In a way it was like learning to see for the first time.”

But Mariano stops short of making too much of the craft. “Fundamentally photography is very easy,” he said. “Everybody takes pictures.  You point the camera, press a button and you have a photograph. Anybody can learn about the camera equipment, studio lighting, Photoshop and all of the other tools that professional photographers use in the process of making pictures.” So what makes one person so much better than another? “Your competence to see,” Mariano says.

“As a photographer what you are doing is putting the viewer in direct confrontation with something you looked at. To make it interesting the picture has to show the world with something of a twist.  What you are doing is finding the extraordinary in ordinary things. This is not a hard thing to do either. The world is an exceptionally beautiful, delicate, ever changing place.”

At its basic, he says photography is the “ability to observe, to allow intimacy with an object, and a moment that will create a picture that is moving.”